On January 11, the citizens of Taiwan will go to the polls to elect a President. If the current projections are right, the incumbent President, Tsai Ing-wen, will be elected for a second term. This will be the sixth national election since the turn of the century, four of which have been won by a Democratic Progressive Party candidate—the party that historically has had little interest in close ties with the Chinese mainland and absolutely no interest in unification.
Indeed, President Tsai’s victory in 2016 came in the aftermath of nationwide protests by Taiwanese who thought the administration of the then-President Ma Ying-jeou had negotiated too many agreements tying the island’s economy to that of the People’s Republic. Given the enormous difference in the size of the two economies, the various agreements Ma was signing were viewed as undermining Taiwan’s de facto independence. Ma’s party, the China-leaning Kuomintang (KMT), was swept out of office, losing not only the presidency but also its majority in Taiwan’s legislature.
After the elections for Mayors and local magistrates in November 2018 produced resounding and, in some instances, surprising victories for KMT candidates, Tsai’s prospects for re-election seemed dim. Never a populist-style candidate, Tsai’s government had tackled a number of highly contentious issues and did so in ways that many believed hurt their pocketbooks. It appeared that Taiwan’s politics were becoming normalized in the sense that one party wins, its popularity wanes for all kinds of reasons, and the other major party reasserts itself.
However, the ground shifted once again in the wake of the mass demonstrations that began in Hong Kong after the attempt to pass a law allowing Hong Kongers to be extradited to the PRC. The protests in Hong Kong, and Beijing’s harsh reaction to them, has put a nail in the coffin of the idea that Beijing was serious about maintaining the model of “one country, two systems” for the city. Promises of democracy had been put aside, and China was increasingly squeezing Hong Kong’s civic life into a narrower and narrower alley. Since the idea of “one country, two systems” was first bruited about by Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping specifically for Taiwan as a way of bridging the gap between the two under “one China,” it was inevitable that events in Hong Kong would have an impact on Taiwanese public opinion. And they did. Although most Taiwanese are not looking for a fight with the mainland, the majority have reacted to events in Hong Kong by dramatically boosting Tsai, as the leader of the party seen as most reliable in guarding the island’s democracy.
This shift was fueled in turn by the KMT nominating Han Kuo-yu, the Mayor of the port city Kaohsiung, whose campaign for Mayor appeared to be aided by Taiwan media (whose owners had large business interests on the mainland), and by reports that PRC operatives had assisted in Han’s own social media efforts. The fact that Han was slow to respond to what was going on in Hong Kong and, most recently, refused even to concede that China might be a threat to the island has only reinforced worries about how serious he would be in sustaining the country’s independence.
In short, whatever the complaints about Tsai’s government and its policies, the election had moved to new, more fundamental grounds.
None of this should come as a surprise. Poll after poll in recent years has shown that a declining number of the island’s residents identify themselves as Chinese—consistently well below 10 percent. Most see themselves as ethnically Chinese but Taiwanese citizens, or simply Taiwanese. Self-rule in Taiwan has only deepened the island’s sense of itself as a distinct nation.
This trend is running headlong into President Xi Jinping’s goal to bring the island into the mainland’s fold, which in turn is bumping into the Trump Administration’s policy agenda of a “Free and Open Indo-Pacific.” Xi’s imperial ambitions for China cannot coexist with a U.S. national security policy that defines China as a revisionist power determined to overturn the American regional security order. Something has to give. The status quo in which the United States engages with China and Taiwan under the “one China” principle, with Washington’s only red line being a “peaceful” resolution of Taiwan Strait relations, is unraveling before our eyes.
It’s unraveling in good measure because Xi’s ambitions have coincided with the steady and substantial modernization of the Chinese military. The balance of military power in the Strait has flipped from 20 years ago. And while the Trump team should be credited with expediting arms sales to Taiwan, the question is whether the arms being bought are sufficient or the right ones. Nor has it helped that the Trump Administration has not taken up in a more substantive way Congress’s push to have closer military-to-military ties with the Taiwanese.
Taiwan’s location—situated between the two treaty-allied states of Japan and the Philippines, with waterways north and south of the island through which China could reach into the broader Pacific, and just north of the South China Sea—is undoubtedly of strategic interest to the United States. It is foolish to think that, should a conflict arise in the region, operational cooperation between the American and Taiwanese militaries would not be mutually beneficial and perhaps necessary.
As with other countries in the region, China’s economic rise led to a deeper dependence on the mainland market and the mainland as a manufacturing base for Taiwanese businesses. That has begun to change somewhat as China’s growth slows and other countries provide cheaper labor. However, given Taiwan’s central position in the global technology supply chain, it is in the United States’s strategic interest to help reduce that dependence by negotiating a free trade agreement with Taipei, over and above whatever economic gain there might be. A re-elected President Tsai ought to be politically freer to make a deal that overcomes local Taiwanese concerns about such an agreement.
Neither recommendation—closer military ties or a free trade agreement—requires recognizing Taiwan diplomatically. It does, however, require recognizing that U.S. policy on Cross Strait relations remains largely stuck in the diplomatic mud of the 1970s and 1980s, and that a new strategic era should result in new policies.
